Determinants of Countywide Voting Behavior on Environmental Ballot Measures: 1990–2000*

Abstract

There is considerable debate in the literature regarding the variables that produce differing levels of countywide support for environmental protection. Competing explanations include differences stemming from individual attributes of residents, economic conditions, and urban‐rural differences. The present study examines why some counties express higher levels of support for environmental protection when voting on environmental ballot measures. Using voting data aggregated at the county level on state‐wide environmental ballot measures in five states, OLS regression is employed to examine the utility of each explanation. The results suggest that while all three hypotheses are accurate in a number of cases and urban counties tend to be more supportive of environmental protection than rural counties, individual attributes and economic conditions appear to be the most influential.

Understanding Environmentalism in a Red, Agricultural State: The Impact of Political Party Identification and Place of Residence

“…Rural residents hold a more utilitarian view of the environment, causing them to be less likely to identify existing environmental dangers as problems that would require regulatory action. In contrast, extractive commodity theory argues that rural residents take a more utilitarian approach to the environment because of their economic interests in jobs or local economies, which are tied to a resource-dependent industry or agriculture (Bennett and McBeth 1998;Jones et al 1999;McBeth and Bennett 2001;Salka 2003;Tremblay and Dunlap 1978). In short, rural residents are less environmentally inclined because they will not bite the hand that feeds them.…”

“…In general, this literature tests the thesis that urban residents are more environmentally concerned than rural residents (Tremblay and Dunlap 1978). Traditionally, two theories drive the debate over the differences in rural-urban environmentalism: differential exposure and extractive commodity (Bennett and McBeth 1998;Jones et al 1999;Salka 2003;Tremblay and Dunlap 1978). Differential exposure suggests that rural residents are less environmentally concerned than urbanites because they have not experienced the adverse effects of environmental degradation (Tremblay and Dunlap 1978).…”

“…As such, place of residence could significantly affect Political Identification and Place of Residence 57 environmentalism in a state like Nebraska because rural residents, specifically farmers, may take a more utilitarian view of the land by accepting greater environmental risks and resisting regulations. Finally, research on rural-urban differences in environmentalism in Midwestern states is noticeably absent with a few exceptions (see Salka 2003;Sharp and Tucker 2005;Williams and Moore 1992).…”

Determinants of Electoral Support for Anti-Gay Marriage Constitutional Amendments: An Examination of Ballot Issues in California and Florida

“…Further, rural residents have historically been exposed to greater use of the environment for economic gain, and thus are more apt to view nature as exploitable. Other scholars have found that, while urban and rural residents do display substantially different values regarding environmental protection, these differences disappear when deeper political and demographic characteristics are examined (Salka 2003;Salka 2001;Alm and Witt 1997;Witt and Alm 1995).…”

Policy Research Using Agent-Based Modeling to Assess Future Impacts of Urban Expansion into Farmlands and Forests

“…That work and others (Berger and Schreinemachers 2006) used survey instruments to sample real populations and various techniques for injecting empirical information into a spatially explicit ABM. Appendix 1 summarizes (1) the representations of agents in our tool, which are derived from validated empirical, approaches used to determine peoples' values using demographic data (Van Liere and Dunlap 1980, Dietz et al 1998, Vaske et al 2001, Steel et al 2003 and (2) the location and number of votes cast on environmental ballot measures that reflect land-use actions that the people voting are willing to take (Deacon and Shapiro 1975, Kahn and Matsusaka 1997, Salka 2003.…”